The present disclosure relates generally to a method for evaluating a forward-buy opportunity relating to a set of products, and particularly to an iterative method for evaluating forward-buy opportunities across multiple products and multiple vendors by taking into consideration a variety of costs, discount rates, budget amounts, and product demand forecast materialization probabilities.
Existing purchasing tools used to evaluate volume purchasing deals of a product may take into consideration different suppliers offering different price discount brackets depending on the intended purchase quantity, but they typically assume that the quantity to be purchased is either fixed or known. Products with deep discount prices, but not offered in bulk quantity, might not be considered. These tools also may not always consider all of the associated costs, and may use an assignment approach to assign a portion of the purchase volume to different suppliers based on their respective price discounts. Accordingly, there remains a need in the art for a purchasing analysis tool that provides a greater degree of flexibility in analyzing forward-buy opportunities across multiple vendors and products while considering a robust set of financial and product related parameters that may or may not be fixed or known.